You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (12 page)

86.
      Spinrad,
RE/Search Guide
, pp. 11–12.

87.
      Alexander Kira,
Bathroom
(1966), p. 95.

88.
      The remnants left on hair patches around the anus that dry and harden have been called “butt nuggets” and “dingle berries.”

89.
      Rose George,
Big Necessity
(2008), pp. 46, 247.

90.
      Kira,
Bathroom
, p. 95.

91.
      Emily Nelson, “Is Wet TP All Dried Up?”
Wall Street Journal
, 15 Apr. 2002.

92.
      Grade school bathroom avoidance has also been found in Brazil, Belgium, and Taiwan. Barbro Lundblad and Anna-Lena Hellström, “Perceptions of School Toilets.”
J. Sch. Health
, Apr. 2005, pp. 125–128.

93.
      George,
Big Necessity
, p. 84.

94.
      Steven Soifer, et al.,
Shy Bladder Syndrome
(2001), p. 38.

95.
      Laura LaRose, “Agony but No Sympathy for Bashful Bladder,”
Calgary Sun
, 22 Nov. 2001.

96.
      Soifer,
Shy Bladder Syndrome
, p. 86.

97.
      Posting from e-mail sent to Steven Soifer on June 27, 2002. Ret.
ShyBladder.org
, 9 Aug. 2006.

98.
      Carol Midgley, “Our Gross Domestic Products,” 28 Aug. 2002.

99.
      Ibid.

100.
    Largely from Abby Rockefeller, “Civilization and Sludge,”
Current World Leaders
, Dec. 1996.

101.
    F.H. King, “Chapter IX: The Utilization of Waste,”
Farmers of 40 Centuries
(1927).

102.
    Julie Horan,
Porcelain God
(1996), pp. 99–100.

103.
    “Water on Tap: What You Need to Know,”
EPA.gov
, Oct. 2003, ret. 9 Aug. 2006.

104.
    Rose George,
Big Necessity
(2008), p. 168.

105.
    Ibid., p. 165.

106.
    For more information on sludge go to the website of the United Sludge-Free Alliance.

107.
    Section from George,
Big Necessity
, pp. 2, 68, 71–72.

108.
    Ibid., p. 68.

109.
    For example, “scatological proverb lore has often been suppressed in collections by prudish collectors and publishers.” Wolfgang Mieder, “Now I Sit Like a Rabbit in the Pepper.”
J. Folklore Res
., Jan.–Apr. 2003, p. 45.

110.
    Havelock Ellis,
My Life
(1939), p. 85.

111.
    David C.F. Wright, “What Makes A Great Composer? Mozart,” 2002, ret.
MusicWeb-International.com
, 2 Oct. 2008.

112.
    “The Battle of Waterloo,”
BBC.co.uk
, ret. 7 Aug. 2003.

113.
    David Irving,
Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor
(1983), p. 9.

114.
    Charlie McCollum, “Miniseries Compelling but Not Insightful,”
Mercury News
, 18 May 2003.

115.
    Irving,
Secret Diaries
, p. 119.

116.
    Ibid., p. 60.

SEX I

W
HAT
I
T
I
S

S
EX
I
S
G
OOD

Sixth grade was the best year of my life. Sports, hobbies, toys, and friends provided all the enjoyment I needed. I was handsome and liked by the girls. Then puberty struck.

At some point during sixth grade I stayed home sick. Bored, I went through my parents’ clothing drawers and found a massage vibrator. I applied it to different parts of my body and when I applied it to my penis, it curiously stiffened and swelled. Manipulation gradually increased the pleasing sensation into my first orgasm. Although the orgasm was a wonderful surprise at the time, I was unaware of its severe consequences.

By seventh grade I was consumed with seeing and touching females. Of course, at exactly that same time, braces were put on my teeth and glasses over my eyes. Moles that were previously barely perceptible were starting to darken and protrude from my face. Guys around me started developing facial hair, body hair, and muscles,
while I only grew taller and skinnier. (One particularly precocious classmate would get up on a bench in the locker room after gym class and display the advanced state of his genitalia while berating our inferior models.) Now that I was ready to reciprocate females’ affection, it disappeared. And as if to mock my reversed fortunes, females began growing breasts.

Things that had given me joy were now irrelevant. Toys have never been the same. My imagination soon sought assistance for masturbation. Some early aids were photographs of naked African women in
National Geographic
magazines and the lingerie sections of the seasonal Sears’ catalogs. I would scour every brassiere photo for the dark suggestion of the model’s underlying nipples.

In the mid-’80s, people were just beginning to use personal computers. I had a pirated strip blackjack game that every fifty games or so would allow me to win enough to see the rough portrayal of a completely naked woman. Amazingly, the green squares that represented her nipples and the green triangle that represented her pubis sufficed to make it worthwhile. More creatively, I had a Mad-Libs game in which I would insert sexual words and names of female classmates. The randomly concocted stories that resulted would arouse me incredibly.

Over time the neighborhood boys realized this new interest was a shared one and by pooling our efforts our visual aids improved. We obtained pornography from trash cans, mail boxes, recycling bins and hand-me-downs from older siblings. One friend hit the mother lode when he discovered thirty years’ worth of
Playboys
in his grandmother’s basement, immaculately left behind by his deceased grandfather. Videos were more difficult to find, but the one or two dubbed VHS cassettes we managed to obtain continuously passed through each of our hands for years. Curiously, despite this pornocopia, no one ever brought up masturbation. That was disgusting. Back then I actually thought I was the only one doing it.

Unfortunately, my experiences with females in the flesh were not as rewarding. The one time I managed a girlfriend was in eighth grade. She never even granted me a kiss. One errant attempt in a back alley nicked her chin, and not much later her friend unceremoniously told me I was dumped. I tried. I dated a lot but the women always ended up with hot jerks. In fact, I still have never kissed a girl from my hometown.

The summer before my senior year in high school I was at a month-long academic program at the University of Pittsburgh. A well-muscled girl from a coal
county took a liking to me and my first-ever make-out was her shoving her blueberry Blow-Pop-flavored tongue down my mouth in a dorm stairwell. On the program’s last night I broke the rules and snuck up to her room. Unfortunately, I ejaculated during the bumbling but ravenous foreplay, and when she manually went to enter my pants I abruptly left to avoid embarrassment.

Looking back on high school, I should have lowered my aesthetic standards, since the only girls interested in reciprocating physical affections were like me— unattractive. Unfortunately, I continuously overestimated my own appearance. This is partially due to my mother and many of my friends’ mothers who said I was tall, dark, and handsome; but a bigger cause was that the mirrors in my house were relatively small with poor (complimentary) lighting.

I did much better with the opposite sex in college, but still could not lose my virginity. It was not from lack of effort. My junior year in college I sat down and tried to list all the women in my life who had explicitly rejected me. I remember that I was relieved to find the list was only about forty names long. I like to tell myself I could have lost my virginity in college if I wanted, and in fact, I was close several times but felt that the first time should be in the bounds of an established and exclusive loving relationship. I guess I believed it should be a well-planned event with flowers on the bed and candles in the windows instead of an ordinary drunken college evening. In retrospect, I greatly regret this conceit.

My junior year in college, I found my “first love.” Unfortunately, she was Palestinian. Although the relationship was satisfying, intercourse was not on the menu. The intense Arab familial shame caused by non-virgins (and the occasional stoning of them) intimidated me. In law school, at the ripe age of twenty-four with thousands of self-administered orgasms behind me, I finally lost my virginity. It was a disappointment. Undoubtedly, sex is great, but I believe if I had just gotten it over with in high school a lot of unnecessary pining, moping, and misery would have been avoided.

Since my late start in the world of sexual intercourse, I have not made up for lost time. Although I have been advised by well-meaning friends that women want sex just as much as men do, my experiences have taught me that this is false. Attractive women are willing to have sex with me only after I have wooed them
and
made a commitment, so until I become handsome, rich, famous, or start lying about
my devotion, nothing will change. I have accepted this fate, and masturbation and long jogs have kept my libido bearable. It is only when I see an extremely voluptuous woman in something partially revealing or form-fitting that my loin tightens, my craving explodes, and I want to carve my eyeballs out. At those times I hate my life.

In its most narrow definition, sex is the penetration of a female’s vagina by a male’s penis. A wider definition of sex is any activity done with the aim of achieving orgasm. Although the situation is improving, Americans are still largely ignorant about sex beyond the basic mechanics. Because of this, there are the following widespread misconceptions:

The largest misconception about sex is that it is not necessary to a person’s well-being. This is false. Sex is a basic human need for men and women.
¹
It is a biological requirement as strong as that of eating and drinking. People will not die if they do not have sex, but the human race will, and that is more important to our genetic programming than the insignificant lives of individuals.

The existence of a sex drive is most evident in sexual desire, that is, the libido, but research is starting to show other ways in which our genetic wiring prods us to procreate. People who do not have sex (1) endure more tension and stress,
²
(2) are unhappier,
³
(3) suffer more from pain,
⁴
(4) look older,
⁵
(5) die younger,
⁶
and (6) have a poorer quality of life.
⁷
Masturbation satiates the sex drive, but evolution has countered this non-procreative release by making it chemically less satisfying.
⁸

Benefits are just beginning to be researched. Government and private foundations have not paid for sex research in the past. Sex is seen as wrong
and sinful outside of marriage, and there has been “a palpable fear of what sex researchers might discover and how it might affect moral and religious standards.”
⁹
The American government’s refusal to fund sex research stood firm even in the face of the late twentieth-century AIDS crisis.
¹⁰
Despite this lack of scientific investigation, the stress of not having sexual release is obvious to (1) the average man, (2) the woman of above-average testosterone levels, and (3) painfully obvious to young men of above-average testosterone levels. These testosterone levels lead to another fundamental misconception.